M. de Tocqueville[651], my brother's brother-in-law, and guardian of my two orphaned nephews, occupied Madame de Senozan's[652] country-seat[653]. On every hand were scaffold legacies. There I saw my nephews grow up with their three Tocqueville cousins, among whom Alexis[654], the author of the _Démocratie en Amérique_, was prominent. He was more spoilt at Verneuil than I had been at Combourg. Is this the last renown that I shall have seen unknown in its swaddling clothes? Alexis de Tocqueville has travelled through the civilized America, of which I have travelled through the forests. Verneuil has changed masters; it has become the property of Madame de Saint-Fargeau, famous through her father[655] and through the Revolution, which adopted her as its daughter. Near Mantes, at the Ménil[656], was Madame de Rosanbo: my nephew, Louis de Chateaubriand, eventually married Mademoiselle d'Orglandes there, niece to Madame de Rosanbo; the latter no longer airs her beauty around the pond and under the beeches of the manor: it has passed. When I went from Verneuil to the Ménil, I came to Mézy[657] on the road: Madame de Mézy was romance wrapped up in virtue and maternal grief. If only her child, which fell from a window and broke its head, had been able, like the young quails which we shot, to fly over the _château_ and take refuge in the Île-Belle, the smiling island of the Seine: _Coturnix per stipulas pascens!_ On the other side of the Seine, not far from the Marais, Madame de Vintimille had introduced me to Méréville[658]. Méréville was an oasis created by the smile of a muse, but of one of those muses whom the Gallic poets call "the learned fairies." Here the adventures of Blanca[659] and of Velléda were read before fashionable generations which, falling one from the other like flowers, to-day listen to the wailing of my years. By degrees my brain, wearying of rest in my Rue de Miromesnil, saw phantoms form before it in the distance. The _Génie du Christianisme_ inspired me with the idea of proving that work by mixing Christian and mythological characters together. A shade which long afterwards I called Cymodocée sketched itself vaguely in my head; not one of its features was fixed. Cymodocée once conceived, I shut myself up with her, as I always do with the daughters of my imagination; but, before they have issued from the dreamy state and arrived from the banks of Lethe through the ivory portals, they often change their shape. If I create them through love, I undo them through love, and the one cherished object which I, later, present to the light is the offspring of a thousand infidelities. I remained only a year in the Rue de Miromesnil, because the house was sold. I arranged with Madame la Marquise de Coislin[660], who let me the top floor of her house on the Place Louis XV[661]. * [Sidenote: The Marquise de Coislin.]